Unfortunately there is currently never a day where coronavirus is not on the news. The coronavirus has been putting the lives and health of people around the world at risk, causing secondary disasters such as economic decline.
Recently there have been news regarding another type of secondary disaster: coronavirus scams. These malicious crimes are targeted toward vulnerable people by using the coronavirus as a way of threatening people, and this is just agonizing.
(See an example of the news here: https://www.newsweek.com/coronavirus-covid19-police-warning-scam-fake-cdc-experts-testing-1493459?fbclid=IwAR2jO2yaRVk-P2l9gQpbqTHkf_c8EO0wHn4FZVRjbArvGW1U5YKRiWDeOqU)
These depressing stories are why we decided to conduct data analysis to uncover the relationship between coronavirus and crimes.
Specifically, we aim to discover a relationship between the coronavirus and crimes in New York City (NYC). Here, we focus on 2 types of crimes: burglary and robbery.
Definitions:
Burglary - entry into a building illegally with intent to commit a crime, especially theft.
Robbery - the action of taking property unlawfully from a person or place by force or threat of force.
(from Google Search's dictionary)
We have 4 reasons why we chose these 2 crimes:
- When the economy is declining, burglary and robbery seem to be crimes that are likely to increase
- There were higher demands for necessity goods, with stores having sold out items, which may also increase the number of cases for burglary and robbery for necessity goods
- Robbery may occur in parallel with coronavirus scams (according to the news)
- Availability of data
->Able to collect all of the burglary and robbery cases during March 2nd to April 12th for the years 2018~2020 in NYC from SpotCrime (https://spotcrime.com/ny/new+york)
The analysis we conduct are the following:
- Difference in the total number of burglary and robbery cases during March 2nd to April 12th, of the years 2018~2020
- Difference in the daily number of burglary and robbery cases during March 2nd to April 12th, in 2020
- Concentration of the location of burglary and robbery cases during March 2nd to April 12th, of the years 2018~2020
We hope this knowledge can support people and businesses understand which crimes they should look out for more, which may help prevent additional crimes.
By Luis Lu and Yuki Nishimura
4/20/2020